Can Religion Still Be Useful?

May 15, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor       “Can Religion Still Be Useful?”     

— Archibald Macleish --  Religion is at its best when

 it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. 

It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking 

we have all the answers for everybody else. 

A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.

A century ago, the journalist and scholar, H. L. Mencken was known as the “sage of Baltimore.” He is having something of a resurrection on the internet these days as Donald Trump has risen to the point of being the Republican nominee for President. Mencken seemed to be almost prophetic in a satirical quip he published in the Baltimore Sun in 1920 when he said:              

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

In 2016 it appears that we have the potential of making Mencken look like Nostradamus though I certainly hope that it doesn’t happen.

I have always enjoyed the bits and pieces of satire and political wisdom I have run across from Mencken but my recent interest has sprung from my discovery of a book he wrote about the evolution and state of religion entitled, Treatise on the Gods.

About 25 years ago, when I first began to teach college classes in religion at Drury University, it was, for me, something akin to walking out of a deep fog into bright sunshine.

I had earned both a seminary degree and a doctorate from a top tier divinity school but it wasn’t until I had to teach New Testament classes that I actually let that education pierce the too comfortable assumptions that I lived with as a Christian pastor. When I had to try to teach undergraduate students about the historical Jesus, using books written by Marcus Borg and his peers in the Jesus Seminar, was when I began to take my academic life into my role as a pastor, a professor, and as just a religious person.

I had known it for years, but I had never let myself say it simply before I had to emphatically say it to a room full of young college students:  Jesus wasn’t God. And even God wasn’t God in the supernatural theistic way that we had been brought up to believe. I spent the next several years retooling what I personally believed and how I viewed what it meant to be a pastor, focusing on the ethical and transformative message of faith while slowly dismissing all of the creedal, ritualistic, and superstitious aspects of traditional religion.

For a long time I was willing to assume that my professors at Vanderbilt and Harvard and the famous writers of the Jesus Seminar  were the first generation of progressive, honest, religious academics. I was willing to credit such writers as Borg, Spong, Armstrong, and Crossan with being unique geniuses who had finally been able to rescue Jesus, Christianity, religion itself, from the confused mire of magical thinking that had held it fast for centuries.

You don’t hear me say this often enough but, my friends, I was wrong. For the most part, the writers we most often name in the progressive movement were not doing very much original scholarship.

Spong, Borg, Crossan, and Armstrong were and are certainly brilliant writers, but they are much more in the vein of popularizers than they are original scholars. Most of what they were saying in their books was said before, much of it a couple of hundred years ago but certainly in the era of Tillich, Neihbur, and Bultmann, early in the 20^th century… it is just that it is hard to read and understand Tillich, Niebuhr, and Bultmann.

But there were contemporaries in more popular writings who were trying to tell us to come out of the Iron Age and to take a serious look at the tenants of our faith. Our provocative and progressive wisdom lesson today is a quote from Archibald Mcleich, an early 20^th century poet. You have often heard me quote from the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who literally begged the public to come to its senses.

And, in 1930, H. L. Mencken wrote this: What the faithful Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would laugh at it…”

Mencken carefully and with painful clarity, describes the evolution of religion from the roots of primitive superstitions and the magical thinking of children and he popularly published it for our grandparents to read when they were young adults.

Why did these insights remain hidden in the fog of magical religious beliefs? I believe that many such helpful and thoughtful works remained largely hidden from public view for the same reason that Mark Twain insisted that his own critical take on organized religion remain unpublished until fifty years had passed after his death.  The priests and pastors whose livelihood and authority depended upon the deception obviously fought against any enlightenment, but the public also resisted, just as they fought and are still fighting in many quarters against Darwin’s work on human evolution.

There was a huge revival movement in the United States following WWII and while the generation following the war saw religion losing its footing in Europe, it became larger than ever in the USA, empowered by radio, then TV, and finally by the sound and video technology that made the mega church a possibility. I don’t know why American’s reacted so differently to the loss and grief experienced in the war than did Europeans or even the defeated Japanese and German people, but where they became increasingly disillusioned about religion, Americans forgot their rich heritage of religious academics and even ignored the insightful work of pre-war journalists, essayists, poets, and novelists, and rushed back into the embrace of magical thinking.

More than half of Americans believe in angels.  We think of Islamic countries as being full of religious fanatics but a much larger percentage of Americans believe in angels than does the population of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In fact, a much larger percentage of Americans believe in angles than believe in global warming. Nearly half of us believe in ghosts and in UFO’s.

And, of course, here in Springfield, the largest church in town in populated with people who not only believe in angels but they believe that they can speak the unintelligible language of angels.  When a guy at a Star Trek convention speaks in Klingon, he generally knows that he is faking….

At our local “Six Flags over Jesus,” they are right now waving their hands in the air and speaking gibberish and telling themselves that it is the language of angels.  And, sobering for me, when they leave there they will return to teaching in our public schools, broadcasting the news on our local TV stations and, some of them will take their place on the bench of our city council.

Is it just me or do you think that teachers, political leaders, and medical professionals should have a basic and reliable orientation to reality? And if we are indifferent about this, is it any wonder that we are not really doing anything about global climate change, renewable energy, sustainable building, or mass transit…. And we actually have lengthy battles at city council meetings about the extent to which women can expose the underside or side of their breasts in public and one councilman who was clearly bottle-fed, has virtual panic attacks about nipples. He can single-handedly make our city look like a giant Darwin’s Waiting Room.

Religion, at its root, is not about beliefs, creeds, or rituals. It is about conduct. It is a way of life. It is a courageously philosophical search for meaning and reality. Our faith should challenge our penchant for violence, our passive acceptance of warfare, our indifference about the poor and the addicted who live all around us.  Our faith should make us want to live lives that are congruent with our core values.

The fake hair and spray-on tans of politicians becomes emblematic of the falseness and irrationality of most of our nation’s religion. We can be better than that and I don’t think that we should ever again settle for less.

As Mencken discusses in some detail, when you are an infant, you cannot distinguish between yourself and others, nor even yourself and objects like furniture and toys. The infant assumes that her mother’s voice is her own, that the rattle in his tiny fist is a part of him.

As soon as a child is able to distinguish themselves from other things, they assume that all things are sentient just like they are. Just like a dog that will bark at a rose bush because a thorn stuck him, assuming that the rose bush meant to do that, a child will assume that stuffed animals and dolls are actually alive and have thoughts and feelings.

At a very early age, children can’t tell the difference between a cartoon and a real person, between Disney animation and a movie. All of these are precursors to a religion based on a personification of nature, of the sky.

Ancient people believed that the sun was a god, later they believed that it was a chariot driven by a god, and even later, at the dawn of Jewish and Christian faith, it was a heavenly body directed across the sky by God’s hand.

The first people who realized that the sun was a burning mass of gas whose gravitation keeps the earth in orbit around it were severely punished for telling the truth. When I have published in our local paper that the stories of Noah and Jonah are not literal history and Jesus was not really divine, the local Baptist Area executive published a letter saying that I was not a Christian and our local Council of Churches would not let us join even though we contribute money, food, and volunteers to their projects.

Folks, the truth is out there…. And it is not on the X-files. There is a modern proverb that says, you cannot fault a child for being afraid of the dark but we can fault an adult who is afraid of the light.

H. L. Mencken claims that there is no difference between a magician and a priest and I know all too well why he said that. But we can be the difference.  We know that our religion is about living a life of prophetic witness and compassionate sacrifice. Beyond all sacred texts, sacraments, rituals, and creeds…. The truth is available to us and we will only live in the fog if we choose it. I pray that we will not ever again be afraid of the light.

These progressive sermons are available as podcasts at:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485

What if Time Has No Beginning and No End?

Easter 7    May 8, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO 

Roger Ray, pastor “What if Time Has No Beginning and No End?”  

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21 ¹²“See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work. ¹³I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” ¹⁴Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. ¹⁶“It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” ¹⁷The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

²⁰The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! ²¹The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.

They say that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are those who divide the world into two groups and then there are those that don’t. It is more than just a little bit of an over simplification but if you will allow me a bit of license, you can generally say that religions can be divided into two groups.

Western religions tend to believe that time is linear, that the world had a beginning and it will have an end. We are born, we live, we die and then we face a final judgement. The earth itself was created, will spend a few years under the sun and then will come to a cataclysmic end.

Eastern religions tend to believe that time is circular, constantly being reborn, renewed, or reincarnated. You can look at nature and draw either conclusion fairly convincingly. Every spring, the earth seems to literally be reborn from the apparent death of winter. Every day, the sun both rises and sets. A great deal of life is cyclical. But our existential experience of life is rather more linear.

That is, we are only young once, and it seems to me that it was for a very short time a long long time ago. Those of us who have loved pets have had to watch the life cycle of our dogs, cats, or horses play out much more quickly than our human lives. Some breeds of dogs can go from being puppies to dying of old age, beset with arthritis and gray hair in the course of a single decade.

Traditional Christians have a somewhat blended view of time. They often accept, quite literally, the Genesis account of the creation of the world and of life, and they accept the Revelation’s apocalyptic view of the final judgement and the end of the world has we have known it. However, the end of the world is just the beginning of an eternal straight line of time that goes on forever.

The Apostle Paul had a very rigid view of existence as having certain periods of time, governed first by the Jewish law and now under the reign of the risen Christ whom Paul and many of his associates clearly believed would be coming back to earth within their own lifetimes to bring the final chapter of world history to a close.

The early church produced many apocalyptic books, of which our book of Revelation is only one. In the end of the first century, when both Jews and Christians were being slaughtered by the Roman empire, this world seemed to be beyond redemption. There was no mere reform or renewal that would be enough. They were ready for this world to end and an entirely new world to begin.

At many times in history, when wars or economic hardship made it seem like the world is beyond being effectively reformed, religious people tend to cast their hopes on a total reboot… that this current world order will meet a cataclysmic end and an entirely new world order will emgere.

Over the past 12 years I have made a lot of trips to Nicaragua working with the relief NGO, the Rainbow Network. I love the people of rural Nicaragua. I have tremendous empathy with them in their poverty and in the challenges they face. But the most frustrating thing about my Central American friends is the fact that they live in a jungle where fruit trees grow easily, many just volunteer to spout up in the jungle, but almost no one ever plants any.

In one village where I frequently visit, Las Rosas, in the Matagalpa region, there is one lady who lives in a shack on top of a hill surrounded by lime and lemon trees, she has oranges and grapefruit, and avocados, and bananas, as well as a garden with beans and squash. And many of the people in the village I talk to will say, “Boy that Lucy sure is lucky.” And I keep saying, “It wasn’t luck. She planted those trees years ago and look how healthy her children are!” And they will reply, “Yeah, she is really lucky.”

Now there are two reasons why these people who live in a very fertile jungle area are always in danger of starvation. The first is that they are the product of two hundred years of virtual slavery in which European descendants came and bought their land and forced the inhabitants to work on their coffee plantations.  They are ten generations deep in not knowing how to grow edible crops.

They grow coffee to be sold at market by the plantation owners. The land owners pay the workers with rice and beans. So, that is one issue: the villagers don’t own the shacks where they live and they have been trained to eat what is given to them and they have forgotten how to grow their own food.

But there is another reason and is that their agriculture based indigenous religions were replaced with Catholicism that taught them to be obedient to their masters and to their government and in return they would get to go to heaven. In the past century, American Protestant evangelicals have swooped in and the ones that have been successful were the ones that taught them that this world is coming to an end and a new world, a heavenly world, is where they should invest their hope.

Nine out of ten sermons delivered in the rural churches is about the claim that we read from the book of Revelation this morning, that Jesus is coming back, probably before the next month, and so planting a tree that won’t bear fruit for a few years is a waste of time. Maybe even planting beans is a waste of time.

There are times when it seems like religion simply doesn’t matter. It doesn’t seem to have much of an impact on people’s behaviors. It seems like most people can go to church and recite creeds about Iron Age mythologies but they go back to their jobs as chemists, engineers, biologists, architects, and economists and appear to have been unaffected by stories about a flat earth, a talking snake, or threats of a coming apocalyptic end of the world.

But I can tell you that this kind of magical thinking has influenced our culture, the culture of Central and South America, and the culture of the Middle East. If you believe that this world is slated to be replaced in the near future, you may take little or no interest in changing anything, from slavery to poverty to the actual malnutrition of your own children.

If you believe that this world will eventually be destroyed and replaced by a heavenly Kingdom, then you might be willing to totally destroy the environment for short term profits from strip mining and burning coal, to burning down rain forests, and genetically modifying all of our food.

And if your religion appears to have been given a perpetual second tier status in the world by super powers, then blowing yourself up or even blowing up your own country in the process of both gaining superiority and gaining personal eternal salvation starts to make sense.

The evangelical imperative of progressive religion is to help the world reject this linear view of time that teaches that there is an eternal world somewhere that matters much more than this world matters. As long as Muslims, Catholics, Evangelicals and Fundamentalists keep beating the drum that says that this world doesn’t matter because it is temporary and the world to come is all that matters, then we end up with a tacit acceptance of poverty, warfare, the destruction of the environment, a perpetually impoverished majority and a forever smug aristocracy that can’t quite believe that most people are so gullible as to keep allowing them to get away with murder.

I never get tired of the very succinct way that Voltaire summed it up: Those who can persuade you to believe in absurdities can convince you to commit atrocities.

I don’t want to begrudge anyone a belief in life after death if that is their personal choice but what I beg of Jews, Christians, and Muslims is to get your head out of the clouds and look at what you know is real. Based only on what we can see and know, all of eternity is here so you do not gain a glorious eternal life by dying in a war, you simply destroy your own existence while destroying the existence of others.

God is not going to bring about an apocalyptic end to life on this planet but we can! We can bring an apocalypse through nuclear war, pollution, and exhaustion of the planet’s resources.

Our faith should unite us, not divide us. Our faith should inspire us to work for justice, to sacrifice for compassion, to strive to make the plight of the poor our own, not lull us into complacency!

I believe that if we can convince our generation to stop believing in absurdities that we have a chance of getting them to stop committing atrocities. Surely God knows it is about time that we got this right. 

A May Day Sermon: Profit vs Environment

May 1, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO   

Roger Ray, pastor    “A May Day Sermon: Profit vs Environment”

Gus Speth, a US adviser on climate change said “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

This week we marked the 30^th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. It was the worst nuclear accident in history though it only killed about 20 people initially. It was not, of course, the explosion that gave the world a reason to panic. It was the resulting release of radiation.  Conservatively, there have been 4000 deaths from cancer caused by the radiation leak though other health organizations say that it may have shortened the lives of a million people.

I remember the news reports of the accident and I can even remember my fairly reflexive feeling that it was an accident caused by the indifference of the Soviet government toward their own people. Russians were not careful enough, they did not value the lives and health of their people, especially those who lived in the vassal states of Eastern Europe.

Of course, what would not have occurred to my young Kentucky mind was the fact that we cause more than 100,000 deaths every year in the USA because of our long standing policy of mining and burning coal. In fact, when you factor in the health costs, burning coal produces the most expensive electricity on the planet. This fact has been demonstrated by research conducted by the Harvard Medical School. 

We have always found it to be absurd that the Soviets valued political power in their tyrannical communist country more than it valued people but even we tend to not question the fact that our capitalist country values economic profit more than we value the lives of our citizens.  

We have not been able to touch the coal industry in this nation until fracking made natural gas seem to be less expensive…. Again, without any real environmental concern about the consequences of fracking. 

When we look across the pond, we can sadly observe the kind of fatalism that has existed in communist nations. They seem to quietly accept the totalitarian government control that limits their freedom, their opportunities, their creativity, their travel, their religion and that excuses government corruption by turning a blind eye to the poverty of the population.

We have a harder time seeing how huge blocks of our own population engages in the same kind of fatalism. My mother’s people came from Appalachia and in the extreme poverty of that coal mining region of the world, the people politically defend the coal industry in order to keep jobs that are keeping them both sick and in poverty.

I don’t know much about Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who has been chosen as the first female and the first black American to be featured on our currency. But this one quote stands out for me, when Tubman was being praised for having freed so many slaves through the underground railroad, she replied, “I freed a thousand slaves but I could have freed thousands more if only I could have convinced them that they were slaves.”

This election cycle has been hard on me personally and it got harder this week as any glimmer of hope for the Sanders campaign was snuffed out. As you have heard me say, I love Barack Obama and I have been embarrassed for my nation that he has been the brunt of so much entirely racist and otherwise unfair criticism. But more even that the race-baiting of right wing critics, I have been infuriated by references to Obama as a left wing socialist. 

The single greatest challenge to American democracy in our generation is the income gap between the rich and the poor. The resources of our nation are rapidly being passed into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Just 65 people, 65 individuals, no more than could ride on a single school bus, now own more than the rest of the world combined… 65 people own as much as the other 4 billion people. And the transfer of wealth from the lower and middle class to the top has been faster under Obama than under any previous president. He is not only not a socialist; he has been the most dangerous capitalist in our lifetime.

As Warren Buffet has observed, there is a class war going on in our nation and rich people have already won.  At least in the Sanders campaign there was sincerity of intent to correct this lethal economic trend before greed creates a permanent peasant class in America. But, if I may borrow an image from Jim Hightower, voters are as confused as a Billy goat on Astro-turf.

Corporate profits have trumped our obvious concern for preserving our environment. Though my kin in Appalachia wanted to defend their coal mining jobs, the coal companies have continued to make the jobs worse and worse. There is now not a single union coal miner in Kentucky. 

Today is May Day, a worker’s holiday in most of the world but not here in the USA where our government has specifically worked hard to prevent May Day from becoming a recognized holiday. President Eisenhower tried to associate it with communists and named May 1^st, “Law Day,” as a refutation of the godlessness, and lawlessness of organized labor and their socialist/communist ties.

Along with many other industries, the mines have managed to break the unions, cutting pensions, health benefits and salaries and they are even considering importing miners from Kazakhstan who are more accustomed to being abused.  A few years ago, when 29 people died in a mining accident in West Virginia, there was finally some teeth to an investigation that revealed that more than 50 people had died due to safety violations in the company managed by Donald Blankenship.

When he was made aware that his mining operation was polluting the municipal water where he lived in West Virginia he had a separate water system built for his own home, at company expense, without doing anything for the rest of the people in the area who were being poisoned. He told one reporter, “I don’t care what people say because Donald Blankenship will go to his grave with more money than any of you.”

When he was finally forced to resign from the Massey Energy Company, he gave himself a $12 million golden parachute. I don’t know if it would have happened if the price of coal had not been so undercut by natural gas, but at least Blankenship has been put on trial and convicted of many crimes for which he will serve six years in prison unless he manages to win on appeal. In spite of having taken millions in profit by sacrificing the lives of dozens of employees, he has been ordered to pay a fine of $250,000.  

A quarter of a million dollars, out of the millions he has been paid, and a possible prison sentence of 6 years for killing more than 50 miners and poisoning the water supply of a million people.

If some Muslim extremist had attacked West Virginia, killed 50 people and poisoned the water supply for the community…how might we have responded? 

So, you see, when crimes of this magnitude are done by a group of people whom we call “terrorists” we are literally willing to go to war. When, however, it is done in the name of business, to cut costs, to make a bigger profit, to pay a CEO multi-million dollar bonuses, we can hardly muster the moral outrage to discuss it.

The corporate bosses in the energy field, to quote Jim Hightower once more, think that they are all top dogs and all of the rest of us are just fire hydrants. And we Americans, especially religious people, have been taught to simply accept this kind of treatment without question, as if, somehow, exploitative capitalism, reserving almost all of our nations resources to the tiniest fraction of our population, was the will of a benevolent God!

But I don’t want to get lost in derogatory accounts of corrupt individuals. We have a systemic problem in our country that consistently puts profit over the environment. We are being led to believe that we cannot both have a thriving economy and a healthy environment. 

You can feel the frustration in the quote we used as our wisdom lesson today from Gus Speth, a US advisor on climate change, who said “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems.

I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”

The spiritual communities in our nation, our churches, our synagogues, our mosques, are the places that must teach the morality of a well-reasoned relationship between the economy and the environment. Capitalism doesn’t have to be evil, but unbridled capitalism is no different from cannibalism.  There is a way to regulate the economy to serve the majority of the population and not just the few who have already won.

It is happening in other nations so you know that it can happen here but democracy lends itself to the influence of money in political donations.  Ask yourselves, why do they have such effective high speed passenger trains in England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, even in Russia and China and around here we only have trains in a few population centers and they don’t work very well?

Our nation was, at one time, on the cutting edge of train travel. We were the world leaders in establishing a network of railways and passenger trains that, in many ways, turned this patchwork quilt of several regions into a single nation. But the manufacture of cars and trucks became a major economic interest and the auto and trucking industry literally bought up railroads and advocated for shutting down lines. So we hear loud objections to subsidizing Amtrack as if our nation’s interstate highways and city streets all just magically appeared without any infrastructure investment.

Freight can be moved on rail for one fourth of what it costs to move the same goods in a semi-trailer truck, and that is without even estimating the increased danger of having so many trucks on our roads or estimating the cost of damage to the roads.  But when you think about the environmental impact and the depletion of the oil reserves in the world it becomes insane. We could save billions of dollars, add centuries to the world supply of oil, while saving the planet and saving thousands of lives in roadway accidents if only we could break the lobbying power of the auto and truck industry to return to passenger and freight rail. 

Our inefficient, expensive, and dangerous addiction to automobiles and trucks is not because science has failed to give us an alternative. It is because capitalism and political donations have become more powerful than logic and morality and that, men and women, is where we come in. 

Do not accept the status quo as a necessary precedent of the future. Do not accept the transfer of wealth into the hands of the few. Do not passively accept the spoiling of the environment and the impoverishment of our children and grandchildren. Vote, speak, write, work, sacrifice because the modern world is still waiting to be born.